As Internet technologies further develop, various kinds of instant messaging systems have emerged. Instant messaging systems are used to communicate, and the instant messaging systems provide greater convenience for everyday living.
The instant messaging systems include instant messaging clients and instant messaging servers. Users acquire instant messaging clients from instant messaging servers and install the acquired instant messaging clients locally to communicate with other instant messaging users.
FIG. 1 is a diagram of an instant messaging client visual interface. Typically, the instant messaging client visual interface is divided into four zones.
A first zone is a dynamic message display zone that receives display messages sent by an instant messaging server. The display messages include a sender's ID and message content. As the quantity of information exchanged between the sender and a receiver increases, information displayed in the dynamic message display zone is “drowned” by newly generated information.
A second zone is an editing zone for messages to be sent. The editing zone allows the user to edit messages that are going to be sent and allows message publication requests to be sent to the instant messaging server. The message publication requests include the sender's ID, a receiver's ID, and the message content.
A third zone is a bulletin board zone. The instant messaging server pushes information to the bulletin board zone to be published. The pushed information is published for a relatively long time in the bulletin board zone, but information content is limited in size. Typically, the number of characters published in the bulletin board zone is limited to between 50 and 100.
A fourth zone is a group member information display zone or another information display zone. The fourth zone is relatively fixed.
Typically, two communication modes conducted by instant messaging system exist:
In a first communication mode, two users conduct message exchanges between themselves. In other words, a sending user sends a message via the second zone to the instant messaging server or directly to a receiving user that has established a link with the sending user. The receiving user receives the message from the instant messaging server or the sending user via the established link, and displays the message in the native first zone. This communication mode is limited to information exchanges between the two users. Also, the amount of data in messages sent by each user is relatively small. Even if the amount of data of the messages sent is larger, viewing a message sent by the other user in real-time is possible because the two users are online.
In a second communication mode, users in a group (e.g., a group of users who are interested in a particular game, live in a specific area, etc.) exchange communications between themselves. In other words, a plurality of users can communicate with each other through a group communication mode. In the group communication mode, a member of the group only sends one message to other members in the group and the other members will see the message content in the first zone. The group members can publish various kinds of messages in this mode. The group communication mode provides advantages in ease of operation and high publishing efficiency. The group communication mode is also well-suited for information broadcasts. For example, suppose that a user has an electronic shop on a website and the user establishes a group via an instant messaging system. In this example, the user is the group host user or administrator, and other users in the group are group members. The group host user can publish merchandise information via the established group. Two specific modes of publication exist. A first publication mode includes publishing merchandise information via an instant messaging server to the second zone of the clients of the group members. A second publication mode includes publishing the merchandise information via an instant messaging server to the third zone of clients of the group members.
In the first publication mode, the group host user sends his own group ID and a portion of the merchandise information from his electronic shop to the second zone of the clients of the group members via the instant messaging server. The instant messaging server determines group members based on the group host user's group ID and pushes the merchandise information to the clients of the group members for display in the first zone so that the group members can view the merchandise information. Not only is the group host user's merchandise information published to provide advertising for the group host user's merchandise, but the first publication mode also facilitates viewing the merchandise information by the group members.
However, the first publication mode whereby merchandise information is published to the first zone of instant messaging clients for display suffers from at least the following limitations:
First, information displayed in the first zone is in a “fluid” state. In other words, a message that is first published can be “drowned” by messages that are published later.
Through the instant messaging server, the group host user sends the merchandise information to be published to the clients where the group members are currently located. As the merchandise information is exchanged between group members, the merchandise information published by the group host user will be “drowned” in a large amount of exchanged information. As a result, group members who login to the instant messaging server after a large amount of exchanged information is received are unable to see the merchandise information published by the group host user immediately. This drowning of the merchandise information lowers the promotional effectiveness of the merchandise information. Also, because of the increase in information exchanged between the group members to the group host user, the exchanged information greatly increases the amount of information sent by the instant messaging server while adding to the load on the instant messaging server and the user clients.
Second, in the first publication mode, publishing merchandise information is more complex.
When the group host user is to publish merchandise information through the instant messaging server, the first step is to edit the merchandise information in the second zone of the instant messaging client where the group host user is logged into. Due to the limited space of the editing zone, the merchandise information is edited to be relatively concise. Since the edited merchandise information is relatively concise, the edited merchandise information cannot highlight the key points of the original merchandise information. The second step is to send the edited merchandise information and the group host user ID to the instant messaging server. The instant messaging server determines group member IDs based on the group host user ID and sends the merchandise information to the clients where group members are located to be displayed in the first zone based on the determined group member IDs.
In the second publication mode, the group host user sends merchandise information to-be-published and the group host user ID to the instant messaging server. The instant messaging server pushes the received merchandise information to clients where group members corresponding to the group host user ID are located for display in the bulletin board zone.
When the second publication mode is employed, content of the published merchandise information is overly simple because of the limited space in the bulletin board zone. Because the content is overly simple, the content only reminds the group members that promotion activities exist. The group host user takes the merchandise information to be promoted, edits the merchandise information, and sends the merchandise information to the instant messaging server in accordance with the bulletin board zone display requirements in the instant messaging software. When the merchandise information undergoes a change, the changed merchandise information is to be re-edited. As a result of the second publication mode, the group host user publishes the merchandise information inefficiently, and the merchandise information is published via the second publication mode with relatively great effort and poor results.
To summarize, the conventional publication modes are restricted in the ways of promoting merchandise information with instant messaging clients, published inefficiently, and fail to meet the user's information publishing goals.